Csmsdust
More Posts from Csmsdust and Others
There are many postdocs in academia, but not so many permanent researchers.
A new paper shows a statistics on where hundreds of Biomedical Sciences PhD graduates eventually ended up 10 years or more after graduation.
What strikes me there:
1. Sooo many postdocs go to administration positions after their postdoc is finished.
And it's true! I know so many people in administration who were good scientists before!
The following graph shows that from 418 PhD graduates, 325 went for a postdoc and 93 didn't. 145 administration/management/operation (AMO in the graph) positions in the end is for me a bit shocking.
2. The time for a postdoc in academia to actually get a permanent/non trainee position can be up to 13 years!
Only half of the people makes in in 6 years after OhD graduation. That's much longer than getting a permanent job in administration. I do not want to be 13 years postdoc. This is also one of the reasons people quit academia.
There are many more facts in the original article. Go read it if you're interested.
https://www.analyticsinsight.net/harvards-free-computer-science-courses-in-2024/
“Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.”
— Ted Chiang’s essay about ChatGPT is required reading
Feeling like a pro in Atomic Force Microscopy
...to be honest I probably should really tell myself that at this point I really am the professional in this method. After 4 years of working with 2 different atomic force microscopes, now I started with a 3rd one, again a new type from a different company.
Only after 2 hours of training on the new machine, I could observe membranes of resistant bacteria all by myself. The membranes are the yellow pancakes sitting flat on the dark support. They are less than 8 nm high (0.000000008 m), as is visible in the blue and red profile lines. So it's super tricky to actually see them. Atomic force microscope touches the surface of my membranes and surrounding support with a tiny tip like with a finger and reconstructs the surface topology. On top of the small size, the cellular membranes are super soft so also the touching finger must be super soft to see them without damaging them.
...with a belief that my subjectivity is the only slice of eternity I am entitled to.
